Apple about to sell its billionth iPhone

Just days after it was reported that Facebook has a billion people using Messenger, the media reported a similar thing with Apple.

The company has either already, or will very soon, sell its one billionth iPhone. In the last reported quarter (Q1 2016), it was unveiled that the company had sold a total of 987 million iPhones in the seven years since its inception. Some 40 million had been sold in the quarter alone, and according to Financial Times, analysts expect at least another 40m quarter ahead.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, gives us a billion.

“Microsoft wanted to put a computer on every desk,” Benedict Evans, partner at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz told FT. “The vision of the smartphone is now a computer in every pocket. We are now at the scale of everyone on earth.”

The smartphone market has hit saturation point, it seems, as analysts expect anywhere between a 15 – 18 per cent drop in sales, year-on-year. The company CEO, Tim Cook, calls it “strong macroeconomic headwinds” but in fact, it's just people replacing their smartphones less frequently.

Apple is facing another problem – Samsung's Galaxy S7 is outselling it in the US, and if the upcoming phone comes without any groundbreaking innovations, growth might be in single digits.

“Investors will increasingly look forward to the 2017 iPhone cycle,” Morgan Stanley wrote. “We see several potentially revolutionary features, especially in display and battery life, that Apple could launch in just over a year from now.”